I used to believe that, while most women can’t have it all, successful men mostly did. For professional women, there would be constant hard choices between family and career; for men, I assumed, career success just made it even more likely that they would get themselves an alpha wife and mother for their kids.

It was obviously true historically that success bought quality and quantity. Genghis Khan, after all, has 16 million male descendants — one in 200 living males — and presumably just as many female ones. And it still looks true at the very top today. Alpha males with serial marriages populate the gossip magazines: whether it’s Donald Trump and Roman Abramovich, with classic ex-model trophy wives and girlfriends, or Rupert Murdoch and Paul McCartney, marrying wives who are decades younger, good-looking and stylish, and also financially successful in their own right.

But go outside the gossip pages, with their love of princes and showgirls, congressmen and pole dancers. Drop below the top quarter or half a percent. From there on, it isn’t true at all. It is not just elite women who are failing to reproduce. Graduate and professional men, men in that top slice of the pyramid, are just the same.

Men’s fertility is generally and curiously under-observed. If you look up “fertility” on the U.S. Census website, you get the message “See under Women.” But we do know what is happening to Harvard graduates.

Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz have analyzed marriage and child-bearing patterns for successive and recent generations of Harvard and Radcliffe graduates (Radcliffe being Harvard’s sister college for women, which from the 1960s on moved toward a complete merger). And what they find are remarkably high, stable, and similar rates of childlessness for men and women. A third or more of these graduates, in successive decades, have had no children. Moreover, total fertility for each cohort has been well below replacement level.

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So Harvard graduates’ children may be born with silver spoons, but there are surprisingly few receiving them. And the same is true for other elite groups, the men as well as the women.

Take Germany. Professor Hermann Adrian, from the University of Mainz, looked at the family size of contemporary members of the German Parliament (the Deutscher Bundestag), omitting anyone under 35. This is as successful a large group as you will get, and two-thirds male. Yet half of these deputies have either only one child or no children at all. Only a little over a fifth have three or more children and, overall, deputies are well short of reproducing themselves. Broken down by political party, only one — the conservative CDU/CSU — has a majority of members with two children or more (and even there the figure is only 60%).

The U.K. has unusually good data on people’s lives, and especially on those born in particular weeks of 1958, 1970, and 2000, who have been tracked carefully ever since by “Birth Cohort Study” researchers. As a result, we know that among people with higher degrees, men and women born in 1958 hit their mid-40s with identical rates of childlessness: 30% for women and 30% for men.

Moreover, among their exact contemporaries, men and women who had any form of college and tertiary education are also nearly identical in the proportions who have, or don’t have, children.

More generally, surveys of the British population in 1990 and 2000 showed that the proportion of men who are childless in their late 30s and early 40s is significantly higher for graduates than it is for nongraduates.

It is true that men’s biological clocks tick more slowly than women’s. At ages 34, 39, and 44, more American men are currently childless than women; but men also tend to be older than women when their first child is born. So, in theory, today’s elite childless men in their 40s could still have lots of children. But if they do, it would mean a major change in male behavior compared to previous generations.

People find it very hard to believe that men and women are so similar. “Clever devils get the bird” read a headline in a recent Sunday newspaper; successful men get the girls, high-flying women have trouble finding a mate. It was a story to confirm our preconceptions — only the people concerned were in fact all born before the Second World War.

At work, I used to notice what I expected to see, namely the childless unmarried women and the men who remarried. But when I looked properly at fellow academics over 40 in my own sizeable department, there were indeed almost no differences between women and men. Just one of us has children from more than one marriage, and yes, he’s male: but childlessness, marriage, and remarriage rates are almost perfectly balanced across men and women. It is indeed another way in which elite men and women have converged.